Goktepe

About

Sculptors working forty kilometers from Aphrodisias found a rare two-toned black-and-white stone in this Carian plateau quarry, alongside a fine white marble that rivaled the city's own famous material. Aphrodisian workshops drew on Goktepe stone for statues that traveled as far as Rome and Gaul. Quarrying began in the early 1st century CE, and by 117 CE, just before its output peaked under Hadrian, the site was already an established alternate source for Aphrodisias.

What happened here

The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.

Sources

• https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-archaeology/article/abs/quarries-in-the-region-of-aphrodisias-the-black-and-white-marbles-of-goktepe-mugla/622FD8482AEE657400F803323643D8FD
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292711299_Discovery_and_preliminary_investigation_of_the_Goktepe_marble_quarries_Mugla_Turkey_and_their_Role_as_an_Alternative_Source_of_Aphrodisias_marbles